SGI has introduced its Altix UV supercomputer, targeted at high-end supercomputing. The Altix UV uses Intel Xeon x86 processors to deliver a scalable shared-memory supercomputer, which SGI claims is the fastest in the world.
Altix UV enables scaling from 32 to 2,048 cores with architectural provisioning for up to 262,144 cores, while supporting up to 16 terabytes of global shared memory in a single system image (SSI). Superior performance is built into every SGI Altix UV system, leveraging SGI’s high speed 15GB per second interconnect NUMAlink 5 and MPI Offload Engine (MOE) acceleration.
Based on open standards, the system’s x86 architecture leverages quad-, six- or eight-core Intel Xeon processors, codenamed 'Nehalem-EX'. This allows for the use of completely unmodified Novell SUSE or Red Hat Linux operating systems. Altix UV is ideal for open source, custom and commercial applications, ranging from technical computing applications like Ansys Fluent to enterprise applications like Oracle.
Altix UV is ideal for a full spectrum of HPC environments. Equally capable of running shared memory and distributed memory applications, Altix UV offers particularly high performance when it comes to I/O-bound and memory-bound applications such as in-memory and very large databases. Customers already adopting Altix UV include the University of Tennessee, the North German Supercomputing Alliance (HLRN), CALcul en MIdi-Pyrénées/Computations in Midi-Pyrénées (CALMIP) based at the University of Toulouse in France, and the Institute of Low Temperature Science at Hokkaido University in Japan. In addition to scientific research institutions, SGI has received multiple orders from leading Federal integrators, which speaks to the importance of Altix UV in the government
